The Paris Tribune at One Hundred

Gale Primary Sources Start at the source. The Paris Tribune at One Hundred Richard Reeves Originally published in American Heritage Magazine, November 1987. Volume 38, Issue 7. Various source media, International Herald Tribune Historical Archive 1887-2013 EMPOWER™ RESEARCH I was, I believe, the last person to leave the newsroom short trips, the younger Bennett never returned. He ran of the New York Herald Tribune on April 23, 1966, the day the Herald for forty-two years by cable from his homes it folded. I walked through the lobby down to West and yachts around Europe and the Mediterranean. Forty-first Street and then went back upstairs and took home with me the stereotype mats of the last two front pages. No one would see their like again. Bennett succeeded—and failed—in great and arrogant style, a genius of sorts. Probably a mad one. In 1869 he sent a reporter named Henry M. Stanley to Africa But of course I did, and so did everyone else. In Paris. presuming he could find the lost Scottish missionary For me, it was seeing a ghost. The breath went out of Dr. David Livingstone. Once he sent a cable to his editor me the first time I came upon the Paris edition of the back in New York asking for a list of “indispensable” Herald Tribune—the survivor, one hundred years old men on the staff, then fired everyone on the list. “I want this month. no indispensable men working for me” was his full explanation. Who could have guessed? The thing started only because James Gordon Bennett, Jr., was such a wild Sending such cables, Bennett learned, was man. Not everyone believes the story that he suddenly extraordinarily expensive. Western Union, controlled by decided to leave New York for Paris in 1877 because of Jay Gould, had a monopoly on transatlantic service and the uproar after he drunkenly broke up a New Year’s charged whatever it pleased. So Bennett, who was party by relieving himself into the grand piano in his supposed to be the third richest man in America, went fiancee’s Manhattan home. No, some say he did it in the into partnership with the man some said was the fireplace. richest, John W. Mackay, owner of the Comstock Lode silver mine, and they laid a competing cable. By 1887 the two companies were in a price war, and cable costs Wherever it happened, he did it. The engagement to plummeted. That was the year Bennett started the Caroline May was ended and her brother horsewhipped Paris Herald. The new cable rates had made it possible Bennett outside the Union Club the next day. Bennett, to transmit copy between New York and Paris at a thirty-five years old and one of the richest and most reasonable cost. powerful men in the country, had gone too far. This most romantic of American newspapers, a century So he went back to Paris. He had grown up there old and now called the International Herald Tribune, was because his mother, who was from Ireland, couldn’t a result of available technology. It still is, selling more stand the abuse that James Gordon Bennett, Sr., than 170,000 copies each day in 164 countries. But that attracted as founder of the most controversial and is getting ahead of the story of how one of the worst successful newspaper in the United States. Except for papers in the history of the English language, a wild man’s bauble, became the unofficial but very Or if he said Theodore Roosevelt’s name would not authoritative voice of America almost everywhere in the appear in the Paris Herald, it would not appear. And it world—and ended up being loved in the bargain. didn’t after the former President bolted the Republican party in 1912. Then, three years later, when the Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine, TR’s name The first European edition—called just The New York reappeared in the most dramatic, if unprofessional, Herald—appeared without ceremony in Paris on way. The paper’s report of the sinking ended with this Tuesday morning, October 4, 1887. The lead headline italicized paragraph: “What is President Wilson going to for the four-page paper was THE NEW YORK LETTER, do? What a pity Mr. Roosevelt is not President!” which covered everything from the doings of the Knights of Labor to preparations for the America’s Cup. The sailing story was a natural for Bennett, one of the In World War I, Bennett became an unlikely hero. He world’s great yachtsmen and holder of a transatlantic was an old man, dying really, but he personally took sailing record. over the daily operation of the paper as the German army advanced on Paris. He published every day, even when French newspapers (and many of his own The first edition was also filled with another Bennett employees) had fled the city. Two years later, with the obsession: names. One and a half columns were filled Allies on the way to victory—and the American with the names of Americans who happened to be in Expeditionary Forces buying 350,000 Heralds each Paris. For the thirty-one years of Bennett’s reign, day—he went to his villa in the south of France to die. Herald staffers checked hotel registries for the names of foreign visitors and published them along with a list of the people who visited an office of the paper on During the last months of his life, he negotiated a Avenue de l’Opéra. $50,000 loan from the Rothschild Bank for living expenses. He had spent $40 million, a great deal of it on the Paris Herald, which never made a centime until Bennett’s own name, however, did not appear in his the Yanks came in 1917. Millions went, too, for newspaper until just after he died, on May 14,1918. But automobile races and balloon ascensions, two Bennett everything else in it was his. Before the first edition was passions, and for his yachts, particularly the Lysistrata, put together, he called the staff together and told them: built in 1901 at a cost of $650,000 and staffed by a crew “I want you gentlemen to remember that I am the only of 101- including an Alderney cow for morning milk. reader of this paper. I am the only one to be pleased....I consider a dead dog in the rue du Louvre more interesting for the Herald than a devastating flood in Bennett’s estate was not settled until 1920, when the China. I want one feature article a day. If I say the New York Herald, the Evening Telegram, and the Paris feature is to be black beetles, black beetles it’s going to Herald were sold for $4 million to Frank Munsey, the be.” owner of the New York Sun. By then the doughboys had gone home and the Paris circulation was back at its Herald’s respectability and new prosperity was pre-war level. But the paper was surviving—a knack it September 20, 1927, when a fifty-six-page special had through good times and bad, mostly bad, against a edition celebrated the tenth-anniversary parade of dozen other English-language competitors over the twenty thousand American Legionnaires down the years. Champs. And in 1924 the Paris Herald survived again when There was barely room—and no Herald reporter Munsey sold the New York Herald to the family of Ogden assigned—for a small story that day under the headline Reid, owners of Horace Greeley’s old paper, the New FEW ATTEND ISADORA DUNCAN’S RITÈS. Actually five York Tribune—creating the New York Herald Tribune. The thousand people did turn out in the rain to pay final Paris edition, though, did not change its name, because homage to the American dancer who represented the there was then a Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune. spirit of twentieth-century feminism and the avant- garde. But they probably weren’t Herald readers. The golden twenties meant Harding, Coolidge, Babbitt, and Prohibition on one side of the Atlantic, and Whichever side of the Seine an American Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, newspaperman was working, Paris was a hell of a place and Henry Miller on the Left Bank of the Seine. The to be in the 1920s. This is the way it was in the Herald Herald stood squarely and solidly with Harding and offices during those days, according to an account by a Coolidge. It was the newspaper of the Right Bank. rewrite man, Ken Stewart: “The night-side would “Paris Clubland” was a popular Herald feature, straggle in about eight o’clock, well wined and dined, to documenting the genteel doings of the American Club take over from the day staff, which had leisurely and the groups at the American Church, the Episcopal collected the tourist registrations at the Right Bank Cathedral, the Rotary and the American Legion. hotels, recorded the comings and goings from the Circulation rose to 39,000 by 1929 and advertising Riviera, interviewed arrivals on boat trains, listened to tripled—while the scruffier Tribune was catering to the the talks on international amity at the Anglo-American Left Bank and filling columns with stuff by Miller, who and Franco-American luncheons. was a Tribune proofreader, and by James Thurber, William L. Shirer, Waverley Root, plus the Hemingway crowd. “After a few preliminaries, we would drift out again to the corner bistro for coffee or liquor, then come back to deskeletonize the cables....” By 1930 the Herald had become profitable enough to build a new building on the Rue de Berri, just off the Champs-Elysée, and to introduce the first rotogravure “Deskeletonization” was at the heart of the operations magazine section in France.

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